


302 Days

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Character Death, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Kidnapping, Moving On, Nominated for the 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards Best Angst, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-15 05:37:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4594830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spencer Reid finally has his happily ever after. </p><p>It's a pity he had to die to get there.</p><p>---</p><p>
  <strong> Nominated for the 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards - Best Angst </strong>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 34 Days

**Author's Note:**

> **On the first day,** Spencer Reid opens his eyes to unending black. He screams until he can’t scream anymore. His throat is raw and swollen.

 

**They realize he’s missing on the third day.** Ten a.m. comes and goes and his seat remains vacant. His cell goes to voicemail. It’s a Monday. They’re confused. They’re not scared.

That will change.

Garcia runs a search for his cell and closes her eyes to remind herself to breathe when it comes up empty. It’s not that she’s expecting the worst; it’s that she’s always known the worst is possible. Morgan knocks twice on the door of his apartment and then kicks it in. He recalls the price of being late, and he’s learned before what the texture of a teammate’s blood feels like on his hands. The apartment is empty, but there’s food on the table. Flies hum around it. It’s not rotten, just dry: pasta and sauce with cheese sitting untouched in the packet next to it.

Morgan throws up anyway, once he’s back at the Bureau and remembering loss.

Hotch doesn’t knock before he walks into Strauss’s office. His face is calm, but his hands betray him. They shake. Now, he’s scared. The pasta scared him. Scared them all.

We have a problem, he tells her.

 

**On the fourth day,** there’s light. He keeps himself calm by documenting his surroundings.

One: one chair, one lightbulb.

Two: two is the smallest prime number and there are two solid hinges on the heavy steel door. It’s been two years since Foyet.

Three: three bars on the window, oaths are traditionally repeated three times, his last coffee was three US dollars. Three barleycorns in an inch, three feet in a yard, three miles in a league.

Four: the word four has the same number of letters as its value, the only number in the English language to do so. The cell he might die in is four feet squared. There are four wings on a bee and four leaves on a clover, if you’re lucky. He doesn’t feel lucky.

Five: five days since he’d said goodbye to his team. A pentasyllabic word has five syllables, like the word pentasyllabic itself.

Six. He misses his team.

 

**On the ninth day,** he closes his eyes in his own personal hell,  and when he opens them again he’s in his apartment and the light is so bright his eyes burn with it. He’s cleaner than he was a day ago and his skin shows no signs of the injuries he knows he’d sustained.

He stands hesitantly and walks around the apartment, noting the crime scene tape across the window with the fire escape and that someone, probably JJ, has cleaned the dinner he’d never eaten from the kitchen table. When he opens the fridge door, the motor hums and chokes uncertainly. He turns on a tap and blinks. In that blink, the tap is now off and the sink is dry.

He retreats to the taped-up window and presses his face against the pane. The glass is clear. His breath does nothing to fog the glass.

His breath does nothing.

He stands like that until the sun goes down and then he returns to the spot on the floor he’d woken up on. The light of traffic outside flickers across his ceiling.

He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t breathe and he doesn’t say a word.

 

**On the twelfth day,** Hotch forces Prentiss to leave the office and get some sleep. Instead, she finds her way to his apartment and lets herself in. Running her hands across the embossed titles of the books on his shelf, she reads every one of them with a painstaking reverence. Years from now, she’ll have trouble remembering the sound of his voice, but she never forgets these books.

When he finds her, she’s asleep on his bed with her cheeks flushed and sticky. He curls up next to her and tells her about his childhood and the different types of tears that the human body can produce. They don’t touch.

She wakes the next day with a headache and the melancholic sensation of having lost something.

 

**On the sixteenth day,** they refuse to give up hope. Garcia hasn’t been home since it began. JJ rings Will and asks to speak to Henry, but when she hears his voice all she does is cry. They find leads, but in the end, the trail goes cold and they’re left with nothing.

 

When Aaron Hotchner receives a lock of his youngest agent’s hair in a priority mail package, **it’s** **the thirty-fourth day**. 


	2. 42 Days

**Their first breakthrough comes on the thirty-sixth day.** The postage on the stamp leads them to a sleepy backwater in Georgia. The jet ride is silent and tense and memories of a previous Georgia case haunt them. Just as personal. Just as damning. If there is a God, Morgan thinks privately, then he’s turned his back on them and is laughing about the finality of doing so. It will be the last time he wonders about whether God exists. From this day forward, he’s sure he doesn’t.

Emily dares to think that maybe, once again, they’ll bring Reid home from here. Hotch knows better, but he can see the hope lining her shoulders and it makes him feel tired and old.

The lady at the post office can’t help them with placing the return address but she gives them the surveillance footage of the day it was posted. They narrow it down to three people, all male, all Caucasian, all in their late forties. Rossi has a gut feeling about the smallest of the three, a man so painfully nondescript that outside of this job, he wouldn’t give him the time of day. But in this job? In this job, he distrusts normality.

 

he spends countless days pacing his empty apartment. after emily, no one visits. he’s left alone with his thoughts, but he’s never been good at doing nothing. there’s a perverse kind of joy in making pipes rattle in the wall, and he amuses himself by tapping out messages in code to his neighbours. they don’t seem to understand his meaning, even when he painstakingly taps out a polite request in morse to the floor above to turn down their tv, or at least change the channel to something slightly more entertaining than repeats of pawn stars. his tv had shorted out when he’d touched it, and he’d avoided touching any electronics after that. when he tries to read his books, the pages slip through his fingers and the text is a jumbled mess of unreadable symbols. he thinks out of everything he’s lost, it’s language that hurts the most.

 

**It’s the fortieth day.** Garcia finds the men from the footage and they’re given warrants with obscene haste. No judge likes the idea of a kidnapped fed in their town and the atmosphere is ugly. Two houses come up empty, the men with watertight alibis. The third is empty, stripped clean. There’s nothing to find except a single casefile sitting atop a shoebox in the middle of the master bedroom. The casefile is for a case Hotch and Gideon worked together years ago. Missing teenage girls ranging across multiple states. They’d had suspects, but had never closed the case.

They’d never found the bodies either.

Hotch opens the shoebox with steady hands and when he sees the photos within, he thinks what he’s feeling might be relief. When he stands, his legs fold out under him. The next thing he knows is sitting on the porch with his head between his knees and Emily bracing him upright. Her head is pressed to his shoulder, his vest leaving a red line where she’s pushing her cheek against it. His shirt is damp.

When Morgan sees the photos, he vomits until his gut aches with the force of it. He’ll forevermore associate the taste of Chow Mein with the image of his friend slumped stiffly on a wooden chair, eyes open and as empty as every other victim they’d seen previously.

JJ says nothing but she studies the photos closely and quietly promises that the man who did this will die before she’s done.

She’s always been vengeful.

 

he doesn’t sleep anymore, but if he stops paying attention he finds that time stops meaning anything to him. it’s a feeling very much like fading. it’s a feeling very much like giving up.

it’s a kinder feeling than hanging on.

he knows he should be doing something. moving on, trying to leave the apartment, anything really. he just can’t find the strength to care. there’s a picture of him and henry at halloween taped to the fridge. he stares at it for what feels like hours but turns out to be days and feels nothing. he thinks that maybe if he tries hard enough, he could fade away entirely.

 

**On the forty-first day,** JJ pulls the missing person report. Rossi offers to do it, but she can see the strain of holding the team together is starting to wear him down and she declines with what she hopes is a smile.

They’re all pretending now.

 

maybe this time he’s faded for days, at least he might have judging by the phase of the moon as he studies it through the window. he’s not sure what endgame is here, but he hopes it comes soon. everything is silent. the world outside is noiseless. he’s slipping away. when he turns around and away from the blurry view, maeve is standing behind him. even with his newfound disregard for everything, his breath is taken away by how beautiful she is. she doesn’t say anything, just steps forward and reaches out for him.

it’s the first time he’s felt a human touch in almost two months.

it’s the first time he’s ever touched her.

it hurts.

 

**They declare death in absentia on the forty-second day**. JJ listens to the bored man on the phone explaining how the photos are considered proof enough of the death of Spencer William Reid, even in the absence of a body. She thinks to herself that she could have done it so much better. She’d given enough notice of death to family and friends over the years that she could list everything the man had done wrong.

Try to explain and make sense of the tragedy. Not refer to the loved one constantly as ‘the deceased’.

Always deliver bad news in person. How can he possibly judge their reaction from over a phone?

Skip the euphemisms. They make no one feel better except the person who says them.

Never abandon anyone unless they have someone else to hold onto. When she hangs up the phone, she’s alone. It hits her for the first time that this is how he died.

Alone.

 

she takes his hand and pulls him away from the apartment that’s become his prison, and they’re suddenly standing in the library from his dreams. he wants to run his fingers over the covers surrounding them, to let the books settle easily into his hands with his eyes raking greedily over the contents, but he’s trapped by fear. fear that the books will slip from his clumsy hands. fear that the pages will be as jumbled as the ones at home. fear that now he’s lost everything, there’s nothing he can regain.

and a sick, all-encompassing terror that if he walks away from maeve, he’ll never find her again.

her eyes are following his gaze and she says in a voice like a memory’s shadow, _you can read them_. he shivers. the sound is like the final closing of a book. like a gunshot. somehow both of those sounds at once, despite how different they are. soft and loud and, overall, final. she continues and he closes his eyes and thinks of autumn: _they’re in our world. The library of the lost and forgotten._

the library of the lost and forgotten…

he feels like he’s been here before.

his voice is husky and dry from disuse, which is odd considering he hardly has a physical throat to clear anymore. **“Why am I here?”** unlike maeve, he knows that what he’s producing is speech. he knows because it doesn’t belong here. it’s not lost. it’s not forgotten. and it’s not faded.

this is a place of all those things, and he doesn’t quite belong just yet.

maeve watches him with a smile that doesn’t make the sadness in her eyes any less, her grip tightening on his hand. it’s a forgotten pressure. he feels like he’s holding onto a whisper.

_you died. i don’t know how. i’m glad i don’t_.

she looks away from him and he thinks he can see guilt and loneliness in equal parts of her expression.

**“Why are you here?”** he asks.

she sighs and her sighs become words become a breeze that rustles the pages around them and make the room sigh along. he feels like folding into the sound and letting it pull him away.

he’s so focused on not falling he doesn’t hear her reply. he’s too scared to ask again.

 

**Fifty-five days.** They bury a facsimile of him and no one cries. Garcia figures it’s because none of them have the energy left. The coffin they lower into the ground is empty and when she looks at her team, she doesn’t see grief.

All she sees is anger.

 

maeve shows him how to step sideways into other parts of the world, but his travel is sorely limited. he can move from his apartment to the library with ease, simply by following the wistful pull of his attachment to each place. everywhere else is denied him. he can’t even visit his mom. it’s more disconcerting than being trapped in his apartment had been—at least there he could pretend that the world wasn’t still spinning onwards without him. that maybe this was just a strange dream. that maybe there was a waking up in store. a going back. a third chance.

when he feels an unfamiliar tug in his chest he doesn’t think, just follows. it’s a blink longer than his usual steps, and when he’s done he finds himself standing next to morgan as they lower a flag-draped coffin into a grave surrounded by a silent crowd.

the team is there. his father is there. his mother isn’t, but he can’t focus that without his heart twisting in his chest. people are there from college, from school, from before he’d joined the bau. at the end of his life, it’s all culminated in this.

everyone is there.

he paces back and forth in front of them all, greedily drinking in every detail. the world has kept spinning without him. they’re older than he’s ever seen them, and he counts every line on their faces that wasn’t there before, adding them to the tally of what his loved ones have given him. maeve stands by jj, her face expressionless as she watches him. it’s the first time she’s ever followed him from the library. he wonders why she came here of all places. as the crowd disperses, he walks to his side. his team stay, watching the coffin disappear under rich dark soil.

his father stays too, and he’s crying.

**“I was murdered, Maeve,”** reid says eventually. She looks away from him, and he thinks it might be to hide her tears. as though stoniness matters when they’re both dead and rotting.

_who?_ she whispers after a long silence. he shivers again, unable to stop himself. he knows one day he’ll be as small as her. maybe by then, he’ll welcome it.

but he watches hotch put an arm around jj and lead her away, the gloom deepening around them. maybe one day he’ll welcome the fade, but not today.

today, he’s angry.

**“i don’t know… but i will.”**

closure will be his final gift to his team.


	3. 68 Days

**Rossi organizes Reid’s apartment on the sixtieth day**. He does it alone because he can’t bear to see the others’ pain. Letters and diaries and pages filled with Spencer’s small, cramped handwriting go to his mother. He finds presents bought for Henry’s birthday, never to be wrapped, and puts them aside for JJ with a heavy heart. The books he piles neatly into a box labelled _Emily._ He knows the gift will break her heart, but he also knows that she’ll never stop treasuring them. Everything else he carefully seals into boxes, ready to be stored in his basement. Logically, he’s very aware that Spencer Reid is never coming home.

But he’s ready for the possibility.

 

anger is impossible to cling to in the washed-out world of the forgotten library. he goes there incendiary with rage and realizes an unfathomable time later that he’d slipped thoughtlessly into drifting. he’s done nothing but focus on the murmur of maeve’s voice, fascinated by listening to it become clearer, more like human speech to his inhuman ears.

and even when her voice is faded, he can hold her. he does. the sensation of her in his arms is something that is sickeningly like being happy. but haunting him is the knowledge that for him to get this happy ending, he had to die, and he thinks that that’s probably the vilest irony he’s ever known.

when he shivers awake from this timeless unknowing, he can feel grief that isn’t his own dragging at him. confused and lost, he fades away from the unpleasant fibreglass scratching of mourning at his skin, but eventually the feel of it begins to grind him down tirelessly until not even the quiet solitude of laying with maeve can distract him.

he tries to go to his apartment and finds himself in an unfamiliar basement surrounded by boxes with his name carefully scrawled on the side in rossi’s meticulous handwriting. he doesn’t spend long there. its uncomfortable to be surrounded by his entire life packed neatly away.

instead, with his anger and his feeling returning with every second he spends in the waking world, he tries to follow those thin clawing threads. it works. he steps and looks around and almost cries out with what he sees.

he’s in the bullpen, three months after his death.

 

The photos were a taunt, the murderer poking them in the chest and crowing about what he’d achieved. There’s a permanent whiteboard set up in the conference room with the detail of Reid’s case affixed, on wheels so they can turn it blank side out when Garcia enters the room. She’s the only one who hasn’t looked at the photos; they want to keep it that way.

Morgan spends the longest out of all of them studying the photos and the information taped to that board, every moment he’s not focusing on other cases. This is personal, intensely personal. The unsub didn’t just kill their friend; he mocked them about it. Bragged _, look what I did! Look what I’ve done, and what I did, and what I’ll do again unless you catch me._ The other missing girls have nothing in common with Spencer Reid, nothing at all. The killer changed his method, changed his type, just to settle an imagined score with the BAU. Morgan stares at the photos and waits with unending patience for the day he gets to settle his own score.

When they’re not at the Bureau, he still obsesses. Closes his eyes and works on the case. As he looks around the jet, he wonders if the others are doing it too.

He thinks they might be.

 

his team isn’t there so he wanders along halls that are achingly familiar until he finds himself at garcia’s office door, frozen for a moment before he finally steps inside. she’s there. she’s so close to him that he can feel his unbeating heart breaking in his chest. instead of gasping, he settles himself on the desk and silently watches her, pretending for a moment that its three months ago and nothing has changed.

 

She’s looking up the casefile they’d found with the photos for what feels like the millionth time, clicking numbly through the photos of the suspects they’d interviewed. One of them looks vaguely familiar and she pauses on his photo with the cursor tracing the now-hated line of his cruelly normal face. Her phone rings at the exact same time the room hums with electricity, surges, and goes dark.

She screams.

 

the last time he’d seen that face, he was tied to a chair and two days away from his last breath. the sudden anger that ignites in him is echoed in the surge of power around the room and what feels like the scream of countless torn pages as he surges to his feet and lurches towards the thread he can feel oozing wetly from that hated face. by the time the room goes dark and garcia shrieks in surprise, he’s already stepped away. chasing a demon from his worst final days. but he’s still in the dark.

and he’s drowning in it.

he doesn’t know where he is anymore; all he knows is that it’s dark and cold and that he’s frozen with the idea that he’s trapped here and this is where he’ll spend eternity. the dark doesn’t frighten him so much now that he’s dead but the idea that he’s going to fail to say goodbye to maeve twice paralyses him.

the anger is gone replaced by terror, and he’s never felt so alive as he does in the moment when he opens his mouth and screams. he screams and screams and screams until he’s suddenly crying helplessly with maeve in his arms. he doesn’t know why, doesn’t know what happened to make him lose control like this, doesn’t know how she’d found him or why just that she’s there and he’s flickering like a badly tuned radio.

she takes him back to the library and he thanks her for saving him from the dark, barely managing to breathe as she looks at him with an expression that’s both confused and sad. they haven’t stopped crying, neither of them, and he wonders why she’s so distraught.

_i just want to stop feeling this!_ he begs, and only later does he realize how faded his voice had become in that moment. nothing but a whisper.

it frightens him more than the dark ever had.

 

she had gone to her grave having seen him only once but it had only taken that once for her to know that she loved him with every fibre of her being and in this moment his need is the realest thing she knows

it bubbles from the faded library around her searing her with the memory of _living_

she cant ignore that need its as allconsuming as her love had been before the long dark time of dying

she follows that need and finds him looking at her with eyes that are wide with fear hes begging her to get him out of the dark its because she remembers loving him so fiercely that she doesnt correct him

its not dark in this place at all she wishes it was the dark would hide what she can see

shed have known that this was the place hed died even if they werent standing next to his hollow body

 

When her computers are working again, the picture of the man is frozen on one of her monitors. She doesn’t know how she knows it, but she’s _sure_ that this is the man they’re looking for. The team returns and she hands them a file filled with everything she’d come up with on him. It’s a lot. She’s a terrifying force when provoked, and this man provoked her.

Harold John Williams.

She tells them everything she’s found. That he was in every one of the cities the girls had lived in at the time of their murders and that he was once arrested for assaulting a woman at a bus stop. She tells them that he’d bought a plane ticket to Virginia from Georgia a week before Spencer had disappeared, and that he’d gone off the grid since then.

She tells them everything except for that heart stopping moment before the power had returned. The moment when, for a single second, Spencer had been standing behind her with his eyes furiously cold and locked on the monitor where the image of his murderer was shown. She’s not entirely sure if she keeps this from them because she’s worried that they’ll think she’s mad, or because she’s worried that they’ll believe her.

**It’s the sixty-eighth day,** and they finally know where to look.

Surely that means that this is almost over.


	4. 298 Days

he finds that with enough focus he can create a copy of the conference room’s whiteboard in their library, showing the details of his case. he spends so much time stepping from between the two identical boards to make sure that his is perfect, that even maeve’s patience is tested.

_you can’t spend the rest of eternity obsessing over this,_ she pleads of him, watching him pace restlessly in front of the board. he can hear the worry in her tone, and something in him rebels at the thought that he’s once again causing her pain but every moment he spends not working on his case tears at him. he hears her sigh as he ignores her again and then silence as she steps away to wherever she goes without him.

he thinks that maybe he should show more of an interest in her, make the most of this chance they’ve gotten to be happy but he cant. there’s one detail that chases itself endlessly around his head mocking him.

his killer made it personal. he wanted a reaction.

did he get the reaction he wanted?

or would he try again?

 

Harold Williams is a ghost. They find plenty on him up until two years ago, and then nothing until the time just before Reid disappeared. Hotch looks in the mirror one morning and Gideon stares back out at him. Gideon after Boston, with the lost look of a man who had seen far too many people close to him die long before their time.

He looks at his team properly for the first time in months and sees the toll this has taken on them. He sees the new lines on JJ’s face as she ages beyond her years, he sees Prentiss’s bloody fingernails, and he sees that Rossi’s hair is greyer than it is black these days. Most worryingly, he sees the raw anger that has still to fade from Morgan’s eyes.

He makes a call. He faces the backlash.

Morgan is furious, betrayed. Rossi stands with the team. His expression is unreadable, but they’re all profilers. They know that if he wanted to side with Hotch on this, he wouldn’t be standing next to JJ.

Hotch squares his shoulders and turns his face into an unreadable mask. Strauss is by his side, breathing slightly too quickly for the calm she’s trying to resonate with. He’s almost cruel, but he has to be, because this is hurting him too: “I’m sorry everyone, but it’s been almost seven months. The trail is cold. Williams is a ghost, and it’s time we move on to more pressing cases. We can’t have our attention split anymore.”

“Hotch,” JJ cuts in, and he heads her off before she can voice the words that will derail this meeting.

“My word is final. Reid’s case is closed. He’s dead and unless we receive fresh evidence, it’s over.”

Prentiss is the only one who looks resigned, the only one who’ll meet his eyes. Hotch tries to catch Rossi’s gaze but the other man looks away and studies a file on a desk. Practised evasion. Morgan walks out, his fist slamming into the wall.

Hotch wonders if he’ll come back.

He wouldn’t blame him if he doesn’t.

 

reid feels anger and pain through the threads connecting him to his team. stepping through, he finds himself standing shoulder to shoulder with morgan in the middle of an unexpected downpour. he shivers, an automatic response from a body that no longer feels the cold, and looks about. they’re nowhere in particular, a park near morgan’s house. nothing to point to why his friend is standing in the rain in the middle of a park doing nothing but watching the trees sway in the wind.

he doesn’t have to be a profiler to see how much morgan is hurting. there’s no tears, no screams or anguished shouts, but he can see the pain in the slumped set of his friend’s shoulders and the slight downturn of his mouth.

_my parents were the same,_ maeve says, stepping out behind him. _they seem to know we’re still around. they won’t move on while we’re still here._

spencer tries to catch a raindrop and watches it fall through his hand. he doesn’t remember what rain feels like on his skin, just a vague memory of the sensation of cold. he asks, _did you watch me after you died?_

morgan walks away slowly as though his grief is a visible weight he carries. reid feels their tenuous connection weaken as he moves further away, pulling them back towards the library. maeve takes his hand squeezing slightly. _once. only once. i couldn’t bear it._

they step back together. _Ok_ reid whispers turning his back on the whiteboard. hes not doing his friends any favours by haunting them. _ok._

its time.

 

Morgan comes back. They get a new team member, and he’s not as smart as Reid (who is?) but he’s a good fit. He works well with the team. He leaves, eventually, and they throw him a party to say goodbye but don’t really miss him. JJ laughs again.

It’s been nine months. They’re healing.

Garcia stops glancing around her office every time she turns the light on, looking for something that she’s not quite sure was ever real in the first place.

 

they dont move on not quite yet and maeve tells him to be patient it will happen when its ready he doesnt follow the threads of his team again and eventually they fade enough that he stops noticing them

time passes pleasantly enough

 

**On the two hundredth and ninety-seventh day** , ten a.m. comes and goes and JJ’s seat remains vacant. Rossi looks at Hotch, and in his expression, there’s a nightmare that they’ve never truly escaped.  


	5. 302 Days

**On the first day,** JJ opens her eyes to darkness and the unambiguous smell of rot.

She doesn’t scream because she won’t give the bastard the satisfaction.

 

**Day one,** they think, and it’s a haunting feeling of déjà vu. Time is moving in shuddering gasps; one moment quick and smooth, the next moment drawing out into eternity. There are frantic calls to law enforcement, hospitals, and morgues, calls which later Hotch can’t recall any details from, only that they happened. Morgan is alternately hyper-focused or inconsolable. They can’t help but look at him and see how Spencer was the day Maeve had gone missing. The day she’d died.

Garcia can’t feel anything. She can’t let herself. She sits in her office, door closed, silent and still under the glow of the monitors. They’re running checks on JJ’s cell, on last sightings, on anything she can think of that will help them find their friend.

When she closes her eyes, she imagines the last time she’d seen JJ, as she’d hurried out the door after work. Except when she imagines it again, this time Spencer is by JJ’s side and they walk out hand in hand.

They can’t survive losing another team member. They can’t put another member in the ground.

_Oh god, Spencer,_  Garcia thinks to herself, as loudly as possible. “Please. Please, if you can hear me… help us. Don’t let JJ die alone.”

_Don’t let JJ die like you did._

 

he doesnt sleep not really but he can fade out enough that its almost like sleeping he does it somewhat often because he finds something calming in slowly waking and finding maeve still by his side

but theres nothing calming in the way he wakes this day fear racing through him and making him shake with the strength of it he recognises all the sensations with it the smell of damp earth mildew and rot the way the ties around his wrists cut his skin as he shifts his body the sound of silence broken only by his ragged breathing and the soft dripping of water just outside of his view

he recognises all the sensations but for one big difference

hes not the one feeling them.

 

**She hasn’t seen the man who brought her here, not since he’d dumped her in this hole two days before**. He’d tied her down and left without a word, his greasy skin against hers at odds with the fresh smell of mint on his breath. There’s nothing in the room when she examines it, her heart beating dully in her chest, except for the chair she’s tied to, a single lightbulb, a barred window, and some rubbish kicked carelessly into one corner.

She twists and turns in her bounds, trying to swivel enough that she can see what the trash is. The chair resists all her attempts to move it but she keeps herself busy at her task, trying not to imagine Spence tied to this same chair awaiting a rescue that had never come. Trying not to think of Henry, or Will, or her parents who have already buried one daughter.

Eventually she manages to get a better view of the debris, feeling savagely accomplished as she hooks a foot around it and pulls it closer, even as blood runs down her wrists from the ties. She studies it for far too long before she realizes what it is and, for a moment, all she can focus on is breathing, just continuing to breathe.

The shirt is bloodstained, filthy, and achingly familiar. Clearly left to frighten and shock her.

It works.

She still doesn’t scream.

 

maeve finds him standing by the whiteboard in their library except what had once been pictures of his death are now pictures of his life pictures of him and his team his mom laughing alive

hes frozen staring as though theyre something hes only newly remembering she wonders if hes ever felt what it’s like to forget something before now

_you didnt tell me id forget them_ he says and his voice is like shattered glass. _and now theyre hurting one of them is hurting and i dont know how to find them anymore_

she takes his hand in hers and fancies that she can see the shadows of bruises on the delicate skin of his wrists

they both know what comes next

he doesnt ask her if shell still be there when he returns they both know shell wait forever she doesnt ask him if hes coming back they both know he will do what he has to

he kisses her like hes saying goodbye and this time when he steps away she cant feel him anymore

she waits

 

**On the fifth day,** JJ opens her eyes and Spencer is there.

She’d have thought that she’d finally gone crazy, except he’s not how she’d have expected to hallucinate him. Instead, he’s dressed exactly as he was the last time she’d seen him, right down to the shirt that lies tattered under her feet. But he doesn’t say anything. Just watches her with terrified eyes under the hair that has always just hung on the awkward side of long.

She catches her breath and the longing to reach over and brush it out of his eyes is overwhelming. It brings with it a spiralling cold that sinks deep in her bones, and she knows she’s dying. Maybe she’s already dead. Maybe he’s come to take her home.

“Spence?” she says with a voice that breaks, wondering how long it takes to go mad.

 

he steps back and forth between the hellhole where he’d found jj, and the conference room where his team sit in a broken group. the table holds two spaces that weren’t there before and somehow those empty places seem to contain all the air in the room.

they’re not trying to solve the case, they’re not desperately searching for their second missing colleague, and they’re not living up to his expectations at all. a man he doesn’t know stands in front of them and tells them that they can’t work this case, not again, and not one of them argues with him.

he can’t help but feel betrayed.

he screams at them and lashes out, frantically trying to move something, make something happen to tell them, _i’m here, jj is alive, don’t give up!_ he tries to grab at hotch’s shirt, his hands slipping off as though he’s trying to hold water.

but they don’t listen. maybe they cant. with a scream of rage that echoes in the windows and makes the lights flicker warningly, he steps away.

he goes to her. she’s in the place where he died. one look at her and he knows she’s closer to the library than she is survival. and he knows: he’s all she has right now.

he must save her.

 

**On the fifth day,** Morgan welcomes the numbness that comes with giving up. They aren’t allowed to work the case, Cruz is one breakdown away from putting them all on long-term stress leave and dissolving their team, and he can’t face the look in Hotch’s eyes.

Statistically, she’s dead. She dead and rotting in a shallow grave she’s probably sharing with Spencer.

They’ve failed.

He knows all too well what will happen to them all after this. They’ll splinter apart, unable to face each other with their shared memories of their friends forming a wedge between them. Emily will lose herself in her work. They’ll lose Hotch to the bottom of a bottle, or to his gun on some cold, lonely night when the memories become too much.

Morgan doesn’t know how he’ll lose himself, but he knows he isn’t far off it.

 

The further from JJ he goes, the harder it is to hold on, but he keeps trying. There has to be something he can do to help her other than haunt the cell uselessly! And leaving the room she’s locked in is simple, just sliding through the door. He couldn’t have done it back when he was in his apartment, but everything is a little more unsubstantial these days.

Walking up the stairs outside of her room proves to be a challenge and every step increases the aching feeling in his chest. It’s as though he’s tearing himself apart from the inside out.

He finds it helps to focus on putting his foot down, to feel it firmly plant on the stair before he takes another step. He’s panting. It’s truly a physical effort to climb a simple set of stairs and the ache blooms into a weariness that burns like being alive.

He steps onto the top stair and it creaks under his weight.

**_Creeeeak._ **

he stops in shock, blinking and finding himself back in the room with JJ, staring at her with a startled expression. he feels…

The memory of his heart slams twice and he feels real.

She looks up at him and her eyes widen as they meet his. “Spence?”

 

The sound of the door to the conference room slamming open barely registers, even as Garcia bursts through, choking out words around strangled sobs. “S-Sir! JJ’s phone! It’s been turned back on. I have a location! I’ve found her, guys, I’ve found her!” The atmosphere in the room changes immediately and Rossi sees the hope that flares up in every one of his team members. Even Hotch.

Even Morgan.

**It’s three hundred and two days since Spencer was taken,** and they’re not going to fail again.

 

He can’t speak to her. He doesn’t have the words.

Instead, he turns and slips back out of the door and tries to climb the stairs again, ignoring the shuddering sob that echoes out from the room behind him.


	6. 302+ Days

He makes it up the stairs and through the barred door, and he can feel himself unravelling like a badly packaged ball of wool. It’s a kitchen, a startlingly normal kitchen, and he has no idea what to do next. More steps away, towards the door to a dining area, and the world begins to blur slightly around him. He can’t tell anymore if he’s the ghost or if his surroundings are just as insubstantial as he is.

Maybe none of it is real and this is penance for his sins.

He’s on his knees with no recollection of falling. he stays like that for a moment on the cold floorboards, trying desperately to hold on to who he is.

When he finally steels himself and raises his gaze, the first thing he sees is JJ’s gun.

Second is her phone.

 

She’s cold. It’s the kind of cold that sinks deep into the skin and bone, slowing her body and sapping her energy. She can feel the exhaustion that comes with that kind of cold, her body shaking helplessly. It’s some small relief to her that it’s the kind of cold that eventually turns fatal. At least with that kind of death, it’s peaceful.

She hears the floorboards creak above her, and closes her eyes.

 

His fingers fumble and slip through the phone as though it’s made of smoke, and he grits his teeth against the frustration. Memories of agile fingers weaving illusions and tricks haunt him, and he takes a careful breath before trying again.

He finds that if he focuses intently upon the phone, he can pick it up and hold it in carefully cupped hands. It’s a disconcerting sensation, almost like he’s pouring himself into the small device in his hands, and he fights the urge to violently throw it away from him. Turning it on is a careful challenge, wary of the time he’d shorted out his TV, but he doesn’t let himself revel in the glory of success when the screen lights up. He can’t be sure that Garcia is tracing the phone right now. He’s relatively sure she is, but in his line of work it had always paid to be certain.

There’s no question of who to call. Only when the line connects and Hotch’s voice barks out of the phone does he allow himself to breathe. And speak: **“Hotch.”**

If ever there’s a time for them to be listening, he hopes it’s now.

 

“That was Spencer’s voice.” Garcia is the first one to say it. Hotch hasn’t looked up from the silent phone since the line had cut, terrified of what he’d see in his team's eyes.

He hadn’t wanted to be the first to say it.

“He’s dead,” Rossi says, and it’s a statement of fact. “We all saw those photos. He’s dead.”

Hotch shakes his head, laughing loudly and startling them all. Rossi doesn’t know. Rossi wasn’t there. This isn’t the first time they’d seen Reid brought back from the dead. They’ve all seen it before, except Rossi! He knows he looks mad, knows that his inappropriate laughter is unsettling them all, but he can’t bring himself to _care_.

He’d given the order, he’d given up on Reid. He should have known better. They’d seen him come back before.

“Hotch,” Emily repeats, and he realizes she’s been repeating his name over and over to catch his attention.

He knows he’s not crazy because when he meets her concerned gaze, her face is damp from tears.

Fear or relief, he doesn’t even know the fucking difference anymore.

 

He hears the stairs creak above him and panics, stepping back down to the cell where JJ is held. Her eyes are closed and he notes with concern the blueish tinge to her lips and pallid skin. He has to crouch to reach the hands bound behind her back, slipping his fingers around hers and squeezing tightly. And just like that, he’s spent. He’s done. Dropping his forehead against her chest and listening to the soft sound of her heartbeat, he wonders if he’s going to hear her die. His face is damp. He’s shaking.

It takes him a second to realize the moisture on his face isn’t his.

 

They move towards the house as a group, unwilling to split up this one time. Grim faces above their FBI emblazoned vests, guns drawn, and one shared link of sanity between them. Morgan hesitates just a moment before kicking in the door, turning back to look at his team and nod.

For better or for worse, this is it. This is the end.

The door splinters under his foot and they move in as one cohesive unit, breaking apart to clear every room. The house is normal. They shouldn’t be surprised by this anymore, they’d seen it all before, but for some reason this case feels so personal, so targeted, that they’d expected more.

Prentiss is the first to walk into the kitchen, almost tripping over the phone that lays prone on the floor. She picks it up and no amount of coaxing will turn it back on, but it’s JJ’s. Morgan nudges her and points silently towards the basement door. It sits slightly ajar, revealing nothing more than a sliver of shadow, but the heavy bar attached speaks for itself.

Hotch and Rossi are moments behind, and they enter the basement two by two.

 

She wakes to his hand in hers and his head against her chest, and she thinks for a moment that she’s died, except she figures that if she’d dead, she probably wouldn’t still be tied to this chair. She doesn’t even realize she’s crying until she sees a tear slip off her chin and drip onto him, making him start slightly with shock. When he finally turns his face up to hers, he’s somehow less than he was when she’d seen him earlier, even though she can physically feel his fingers against her skin. His eyes are tired, his skin drawn tight against his face, and she can see the effort it’s taking to hold him together.

“Are you really here?” she asks and then she’s crying helplessly with his arms around her. He’s warm. He’s real.

She’s drifting.

**“Yes.”**

His voice is firm and a whisper all at once. As though she’s listening to a radio just slightly out of tune. She clings anyway and almost begs: “Can you stay?” He shakes his head against her, and she can feel her heart breaking all over again. “You’re gone, aren’t you?” She has to know. She’s needed to know since she saw him slip away through the door like mist, and she’s had hours to contemplate when she would join him.

**“Yes.”**

Even expected, it hurts. His answers are so brusque; she wonders if speaking hurts him. She wonders if they’ll talk more when she’s gone.

She wonders if he’ll stay with her after.

They hear the door open above them, the sound of his feet on the stairs. JJ tries to wipe her tears away on her shoulders, refusing to let him see her weakness, but she can’t hide her terror. “Don’t leave me,” she whispers, and it’s the closest she’s come to begging in the five days she’s been here.

They can feel the moment slipping away from them. He stands in front of her, blocking her view of the door, his hand gripping her shoulder tightly and eyes locked on hers. His mouth moves soundlessly until she reels with a wash of pain and sick heat and suddenly he snaps into focus.

**“I’m sorry I didn’t get to see Henry grow up. Tell the others I miss them. Tell them I never blamed them.”**

He’s saying the things he wasn’t given a chance to say before, and she wishes he would stop. It’s too final, too much like giving in to the inevitable, but she nods and tells him she will anyway.

There’s the sound of a key grating in the lock of her door.

She’s not shivering anymore. She’s not cold anymore.

She thinks that maybe she’s not going to give the bastard who’d put her here the chance to kill her. She slumps. There are arms around her. And his voice…

**“I love you, JJ. I always have, and always will.”**

 

Morgan is in front and it’s him who first sees Williams with the shotgun pointed towards JJ. He moves as fast as he can but he’s not at the right angle to shoot, and he knows he can’t reach her before the trigger is pulled.

But the shotgun jerks upwards as it fires, wrenched out of Williams’ hands. The wall behind JJ’s head exploding into a cloud of dust, Williams staggering back in shock. Morgan doesn’t even think. He doesn’t let himself be distracted: not by JJ slumped bonelessly in the chair, not by the gunshot that deafens him, and definitely fucking not by the furious flicker of a familiar form with his hand bracing the shotgun upright. Morgan just shoots. He’ll deal with the rest later.

The man who’d torn all their lives apart is dead before he hits the ground. Morgan’s bullet ends his life. Not one of the agents pays him any care, except to make sure that he is truly dead, as they push through to reach their friend, ears ringing and heads aching and hearts racing.

JJ’s arms are useless, numb from being tied for five days, and she’s barely conscious. She can’t reciprocate the hug that Emily pulls her into but she leans against her friend and savours the warmth of the other agent’s body, no longer trying to hide the tears in her eyes.

Morgan leans back against a wall, watching the two women comfort each other. Hotch radios for a medic. Rossi is quiet next to him.

“Are we all going to admit to seeing that?” Rossi says finally, his voice overloud as their ears readjust. Morgan doesn’t answer. The others are busy stabilizing JJ.

How could he possibly answer? He doesn’t even know what _that_ was.

And he doesn’t dare to hope.

 

It’s Hotch who finds the loosely packed grave. When the medics take JJ away with Emily at her side, Rossi and Morgan meet him there.

“We don’t have to do this,” Morgan tells him softly, seeing the shock clouding their unit chief. They had all seen the vicious relief that had overtaken him upon hearing that voice on the phone. They had seen his despair when he picked up the torn shirt in JJ’s cell and studied it. They’d seen him stagger when the form by the gun had glanced at him before snapping out of existence like a broken lightbulb.

Nothing was so destructive as hope.

When they uncover the sad remains, Rossi can’t help but think that this isn’t closure, not really. There’s nothing left of the man they’d known in the bare bones and rotten clothes. Nothing to speak of the life he’d led, the friends he’d left.

Hotch is silent.

 

JJ doesn’t tell anyone about what she’d seen in that cell at first. She knows what they’ll say to her, knows they’ll blame it on shock and the hypothermia that had almost taken her life. When they bury his body for real and people shake their heads and talk about finally having closure, she thinks that they have no idea.

She thinks that maybe, out of all of them, she might be the only one who can really move on from this.

 

Garcia comes to her first, and tells her about the phone call that no one is talking about. JJ doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead, she does neither and tells Garcia what she’d seen.

“I didn’t want you to think I was crazy,” she finishes, finally. Garcia is silent for a moment before taking her hand.

“There isn’t one of us that heard that voice that would call you crazy.”

She tells the others and she’s glad she did, even though she can’t tell if they believe her because they want to, or because they have no other explanation.

“Do you think he’s still here?” Morgan asks her, and there’s a hint of bitterness there that it was her that got the goodbye they were all cheated of.

“No,” JJ says, honestly. “Would you stay, if you were him?”

She hopes that maybe he’s finally earned his happy ending.

 

Maeve finds him in the library and there’s something so alive about him in that moment that she knows she never needed to fear.

“Three-hundred and two days since I was taken,” he says to her, but there’s no sadness in his eyes. “And it’s finally over.”

She doesn’t know what to say so she just lets him hug her, the breaths he’s not really breathing tickling her ear.

“Did you know,” he murmurs softly, and she can feel him smile against her skin. “That there are three-hundred and two ways to play the first three moves in a game of Checkers?”

She laughs and then they take the next step together

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited October, 2017.**


End file.
